Monday, July 15, 2013

I'm watching the tweets from #dh2013 starting to roll in and feeling kind of sad (and, let's be honest, left out) not to be there. Conference attendance has been hard the last few years because I didn't have any travel funding in my old job. So I've tended only to go to conferences close to home or where I could get grant funding to pay for them.

It's also quite hard sometimes to decide what conferences to go to. On a self-funded basis, I can manage about one a year. So deciding which one can be hard. I'm a technologist working in a library, on digital humanities projects, with a focus on markup technologies and on ancient studies. So my list is something like:

DH

JCDL

One of many language-focused conferences

The TEI annual meeting

Balisage

I could also make a case for conferences in my home discipline, Classics, but I haven't been to the APA annual meeting in over a decade. Now that the Digital Classics Association exists, that might change.

I tend to cycle through the list above. Last year I went to the TEI meeting, the year before, I went to Clojure/conjandDH (because a grant paid). The year before that, I went to Balisage, which is an absolutely fabulous conference if you're a markup geek like me (seriously, go if you get the chance).

DH is a nice compromise though, because you get a bit of everything. It's also attended by a whole bunch of my friends, and people I'd very much like to become friends with. I didn't bother submitting a proposal for this year, because my job situation was very much up in the air at the time, and indeed, I started working at DC3 just a couple of weeks ago. DH 2013 would have been unfeasible for all kinds of reasons, but I'm still bummed out not to be there. Have a great time y'all. I'll be following from a distance.